The captivating PBS series, now available to universities and libraries.
| The Human Language Series: | ||
| The only attempt ever made to "explain language" in a visual way that all people will enjoy and truly understand. |  |
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| Three 55 minute films by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Gene Searchinger. | ||
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 Noam Chomsky asks, "How do people simply use language? You meet somebody, say, at a bus stop, and you start having a conversation. How do you do it?"
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On city streets, in mountain huts, we see "real people" doing, with ease, the most complex thing that humans do. They are talking, in English and Chinese, Xhosa and Eskimo. How is it possible? The series suggests answers in a swift and entertaining style, with an all-star cast of fifty outstanding linguists and psychologists, plus anthropologists, comedians (Sid Caesar, George Carlin), philosophers, aborigines, tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, Eskimos on St. Lawrence Island, baseball players, authors (Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould), circus performers, dogs, and many, many children. Produced by Gene Searchinger, "a master filmmaker" (George Page, Executive Editor of NATURE, PBS). Nothing like this has been done before.
Among the issues covered: is language an inherited faculty with which all humans are born? If spoken language is unique to our species, how did it evolve? And is it true that all the world's 5,000 tongues are like dialects of one language - the human language?
Language is the most human thing there is about being human.
The program is interdisciplinary, multicultural, intellectually rigorous, and fun. Valuable for courses in many disciplines: |
linguistics | cognitive science |
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psychology | behavioral science |
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English | social science |
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humanities | child development |
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philosophy | education and learning theory |
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anthropology | sociology |
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all the language arts. | |